Dynamic e-business using Web service workflow

by Pravin Morais, Software Engineer, Cysive

Web services will be a critical component in the business plans of corporations as it offers the potential for creating highly dynamic and versatile distributed applications that span technological and business boundaries. One of the revolutionary concepts made possible by the Internet is "electronic value chains". However, enterprises face a daunting challenge when integrating different value chains from different corporations. A Web service workflow has the potential to successfully integrate value chains and opens the door to dynamic e-business collaborations. In this article I will discuss how dynamic e-business can be achieved by applying Electronic Business XML (ebXML) standards to Web service workflow for meeting real world business demands.

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UDDI - understanding tModels UDDI and ebXML Registries/Repositories can be used collaboratively. For example, metadata fields in a UDDI registry can serve as a locator (e.g. a URL) for the associated data stored in an ebXML registry/repository, thereby allowing a UDDI registry to "point to" an ebXML registry/repository. With this in mind, a likely infrastructure model is to use public UDDI registries for basic service advertising, and private ebXML registry/repositories for storage of actual XML resources.

tModels provides a means for businesses to publish information about the specifications and versions of specifications used to design their advertised services within a UDDI registry. This information about specifications is called a tModel within UDDI. The tModel mechanism serves a useful purpose in discovering Web service providers that support a given standard specification. The UDDI API call find_business can be used to located businesses that satisfy a given tModel pattern.

Implementing the Web services workflow In order for a Web service workflow to be able to support business collaboration using the ebXML standard, it needs to support the ebXML Message Service functionality. Sun Java API for XML Messaging (JAXM) is available as a reference implementation for businesses interested in quickly adopting ebXML Message Service functionality. The Sun ebXML Registry/Repository Implementation (RegRep) can be used to submit, store, retrieve, and manage resources to facilitate ebXML-based business-to-business (B2B) partnerships and transactions. Submitted information may be, for example, XML schema and documents, business process descriptions, business context descriptions, UML models, business collaboration information, core components, or even software components. The RegRep implementation uses Enterprise Java Beans (EJB) technology, which reduces development complexity while providing automatic support for middleware services such as database connectivity, transaction management, scalability, and security.

Copyright 2002. Reprinted with permission.
Cysive, Inc. builds mission-critical business systems for Global 2000 firms to help orchestrate interactions with customers, partners and employees across multiple channels such as web, wireless, voice and Web services.

About the Author:

Pravin R. Morais is a software engineer at Cysive, Inc. where he works in Product Development on the Cymbio Interaction Server. Pravin is a Sun Certified Java Programmer and Java Developer, and has a BS in Electronics and Telecommunication Engineering. Pravin may be reached at pmorais@cysive.com.

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